As a standout entry in a foundational modern sci-fi anime franchise, 1994’s Macross Plus was not only an breathtaking return to the series for franchise creator and famed mechanical designer Shōji Kawamori, but besides the directorial debut of 1 Shinichirō Watanabe, known for specified anime classics as Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. There’s quite a few anime past tied up in this series, but for audiences fresh to Macross, Plus is simply a large way into Macross as a whole, a part of what makes the franchise so captivating while carrying its own unique ideas that have remained prescient and timely to this day.
And now, any 30 years after the first episode of the OVA was released, there’s a fresh Blu-ray home release of the anime, including a hefty (and pricey) “Ultimate Edition,” set to release at the end of this period from Crunchyroll in the U.S. and Anime Limited in the U.K. and Europe — the first home video release of Macross Plus in the West since the early 2000s.
The Macross franchise has been through many rights disputes over the past fewer decades, which has rendered respective titles in the series — including the first anime —unavailable to watch in North America. In fresh years, a deal with Disney has made most of them, barring the first Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its movie remake, The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (I had to say the full title at least once), available on streaming, though not in North America.
By comparison, Macross Plus has been far little elusive; the edited movie version has had many theatrical screenings in the U.S. and U.K. over the past fewer years, making it the most accessible entry in the franchise to date. It’s besides arguably the most newcomer-friendly (it’s the 1 I saw first, at least), an isolated communicative that begins with hot-blooded test pilot action, grounding its high-flying sci-fi with a love triangle and a rivalry that began in the protagonist’s youth. While Macross Plus has connections with the earlier series, it’s not impenetrable to newcomers. The real emotional arc of the communicative remains legible, and has a reasonably casual relation with the lore. There are touches that feel familiar, in many ways, to Watanabe’s later work, with any key collaborations beginning with this production here — most prominently composer Yoko Kanno (who composed the score and arranged the AI pop star Sharon Apple tracks) and the late, large screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto (Wolf’s Rain, Tokyo Godfathers), both of whom would go on to later work with Watanabe on Cowboy Bebop.
Image: Sunrise
The communicative is separated from Super Dimension Fortress Macross by decades, set 30 years after the end of the war depicted in the first anime. It’s set in a time where humanity is flourishing alternatively than being on the run as in Macross — now moving multiple planetary colonies in partnership with their old enemy, the alien species known as the Zentradi. This peculiar communicative is on 1 specified colony, the planet Eden.
The movie follows a trio of characters: the test pilots Isamu Dyson and Guld Bowman, and the music maker Myung Fang Lone. They all have past with each other, yet sent their separate ways by an incidental that drove a wedge between the 3 of them, and that emotional baggage drives quite a few the chaos of Plus. Guld is simply a stoic and sometimes even cruel and duplicitous, Isamu is simply a cocksure dope with a broken heart — it should be noted, 1 played by Bryan Cranston in the dub, who is wonderfully lackadaisical and self-assured in his transportation (it’s not his first time as an anime test pilot either, following on from his function in Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnęamise). Myung’s dynamic with the 2 rival pilots is both tender and tense, having been romantically linked with both. Her character is cautious about revisiting the past, but she’s drawn back into their orbit regardless. That turmoil besides affects her secret, real occupation — as the creative basis for the AI pop star Sharon Apple.
The movie Edition and the OVA more or little tell the same story. Both are worth watching, possibly not back to back, as the movie Edition is simply a large streamlining of the 160-minute OVA… though at the expense of any killer “to be continued” stings. The movie Edition is quicker about introducing the AI pop star subplot, jumping consecutive into the absurd pageantry of Sharon’s red carpet appearance, before cutting to Guld and a test flight of his mind-controlled jet, the film’s 2 major reflections on automation placed alongside each other. The OVA begins alternatively explosively, with a training exercise in an asteroid field that takes a small more time in establishing who Isamu is (great skills, very certain of himself, no respect for authority), before introducing his tense relation with Guld and Myung. Though this difference might propose different priorities, both versions begin with the same message: “Dedicated to all pioneers…”
Image: Sunrise
The intertwining of transforming jets and love triangles (or squares) with pop music has always defined the Macross franchise, and the same is actual of Macross Plus, though it approaches those hallmarks from a fresh angle through its main antagonist: an AI pop star that goes rogue. Kawamori himself has spoken on the connection between the film’s depiction of AI with the usage of AI in the present, in an interview with Vulture from earlier this year (he noted that he’d be OK with it being utilized for in-betweening, but questions its ability to make feeling).
The artbook included with the eventual Edition features a lengthy discussion between Kawamori, Watanabe, and Nobumoto, who unpack the thematic and visual ideas of Plus as well as share any stories from production. The 3 note that Watanabe was brought on board for his work on Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory — which itself is worth watching for viewers who enjoy Macross Plus, what with the 2 bearing a resemblance to each another through their shared, Top Gun-flavored test pilot premises.
One of the standout points of Macross Plus is its white-knuckle action — the movie Edition in peculiar makes the heart race the minute it takes to the skies, and the fresh discs are a beautiful transfer of these visuals. In 1 of the interviews included in the artbook, Kawamori, Watanabe, and Ichirō Itano — the pioneer of the celebrated and widely homaged “Itano Circus” (of which there might be between 5 and 7 in Plus, I lost count) who helped guide the action sequences in Macross Plus as the anime’s peculiar visual effects manager — all spoke about how the choreography in Plus was a purposeful shift distant from how dogfights had commonly been depicted in anime up until that time, as well as how they highlighted the immense strain of G-force on the pilots’ bodies balanced with the desperate, repeated banking of the fighter planes during a battle.
Image: Sunrise
In a “special video message” included with the release, first filmed for a North American screening, Kawamori briefly touches on the different aspects of preparation for the film, as well as any another hindsights, while seated in front of a life-size replica of 1 of Macross’ iconic variable fighters. 1 of the major points Kawamori touches on is the inspiration for the dogfights, which he attributes to his time examining fighter improvement in the U.S. any of the experiences he mentions include an air show at the Edwards Air Force Base, a journey to NASA’s Dryden Flight investigation Center to see a prototype of an F-18, and his time air training with Air Combat USA alongside Itano. If the aforementioned Vulture interview is any indication, he undersells it here. As author Eric Vilas-Boas recounts in that interview, the communicative of Itano blacking out during a flight on a fighter jet for investigation is celebrated — a communicative that Itano elaborates on in another interview included the artbook, saying that he experienced “five or six Gs” while in flight and that his body “ached like boy Goku after utilizing the Kaio-ken x10.” specified strain can be felt throughout Plus’ tense aerial duels.
As well as making for any alternatively chaotic pre-production stories, these creative decisions to set Macross Plus apart from its forebears apply to the anime at beautiful much all level, with Watanabe highlighting his “outsider’s perspective” as being key to his function in the production. The same could be said of Nobumoto’s contributions; in the artbook interview, she calls Macross Plus “the first anime task [she] was full active with.” This different position on Macross doesn’t just apply to the action in Macross Plus, but to the emotional contours of its story. The erstwhile Macross movie, Do You Remember Love?, though not set in the same continuity as Plus, touches on how the Zentradi had lost contact with their feelings due to the fact that they stopped creating art. By contrast, Guld, the main Zentradi character who appears in Macross Plus, feels besides passionately, accusing his old friend Dyson of being out of control erstwhile his own impulses are what nearly get Dyson killed.
Further still, in a franchise where you could apply the word “poptimism” very virtually (as Nobumoto says in the interview included in the release, it’s a franchise where a song saves the world), Plus is simply a chilly twist on the series’ attachment to music. Viewed in 2024, the sight of Sharon Apple almost immediately creating disaster feels right for an age where creative industries are dealing with an onslaught of AI junk. That said, the first appearance of Apple as a blocky, HAL 9000-esque computer server walking the red carpet in a lavish gown with a crowd braying in admiration immediately robs the AI idol of any kind of mystique or wonder — alternatively carrying a sense of the absurd.
Image: Sunrise
Obviously, the anime isn’t intended as a commentary on AI art as we realize it now, with the AI communicative for much of Macross Plus feeling like more of a backdrop to the real meat of the narrative: the love triangle between Isamu, Guld, and Myung. But it’s easy to map contemporary fears about AI onto the communicative that Macross Plus is telling. For instance, this AI doesn’t work autonomously; it relies on Myung to complete it. Even in Macross Plus’ version of the year 2040, there’s no specified thing as AI art without human input. Regardless, Sharon Apple is simply a worldwide hit on the planet Eden, and the fact that machines have dominated the fictional charts feels like an expression of a certain paranoia about the digital age eroding the humanity of art, with people more enamored with the phenomenon alternatively than authenticity of feeling. Even the test pilots can’t escape it, and not just due to the fact that Sharon begins pursuing Isamu. His fellow pilots are besides under threat of being replaced in favour of an AI piloted Jet, with 1 reflecting, “Do they think people are unnecessary?” in an amusing overlap with the game of Top Gun: Maverick.
When Lynn Minnmay, a love interest and pop idol vocalist in Macross: Do You Remember Love?, sings her song at the end of the film, it feels freeing, euphoric. By contrast, the music of Macross Plus performed by Sharon Apple is shown to have a pacifying effect. People aren’t galvanized into action or into making amends with 1 another but alternatively look in a trance, oblivious to what she’s truly doing. It’s besides possible to find a tension between the human hand and that of the digital baked into Macross Plus’ production, with Sharon Apple being represented with computer graphics in many of the scenes featuring her, as well as another various graphics. Not to mention that this same thematic thread that would proceed in the 2019 anime Carole & Tuesday, on which Watanabe worked as a supervising manager alongside manager Motonobu Hori, where its eponymous pair of musicians become an outlier by writing their own music alternatively than letting a device do it.
There are so many contemporary films and series, so much of the modern day, that you can see reflected in Macross Plus. It doesn’t just hold up present thanks to its impeccable visual and sonic craft, but for its romanticism and its forward-thinking visions of the future, which just so happens to be shaped by transforming robot fighter jets.
The Macross Plus eventual Edition will be available to acquisition through Crunchyroll in the U.S. and Anime Limited in the U.K. and Europe on Oct. 31.
